Heavy Networking
Packet Pushers
Heavy Networking is an unabashedly nerdy dive into all things networking. Described by one listener as "verbal white papers," the weekly episodes feature network engineers, industry experts, and vendors sharing useful information to keep your professional knowledge sharp and your career growing. Hosts Ethan Banks & Drew Conry-Murray cut through the marketing spin to explore what works—and what doesn't—in networking today, while keeping an eye on what's ahead for the industry. On air since 2010, Heavy Networking is the flagship show of the Packet Pushers podcast network.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Oct 10, 2025 • 1h 12min
HN800: Root Cause Analysis for the Entire Stack (Sponsored)
Today’s show is one of those “We’re living in the future” episodes, where we talk about using AI to perform root cause analysis of a performance issue. But not root cause analysis for just the networking part of the stack. The full stack. Why? Because it’s not good enough to say “it’s not the network”.... Read more »
Oct 3, 2025 • 47min
HN799: Multi-Homing IPv6 to Your Home Lab
If you’ve got an Autonomous System Number (ASN) and an IPv6 block, you too can multi-home IPv6 to your home lab! Sounds easy, right? Well, maybe…but today we’re going to discuss why you’d want to and how you can do that with guest Anton Lönnerbro. Anton is a solutions architect at a managed service provider... Read more »
Sep 26, 2025 • 44min
HN798: Fortinet Offers a SOC Every Org Can Grow Into (Sponsored)
On today’s Heavy Networking: the Security Operations Center, or SOC. When I think of a SOC, I picture a miniature version of NASA’s mission control: lots of computers, lots of people, some big boards with lines and arrows and telemetry scrolling across the screens. I also think of SOCs as requiring a lot of gear,... Read more »
Sep 19, 2025 • 1h 7min
HN797: What To Do When The Business Asks for “AI”
When someone from the executive suite starts an AI initiative, what does that mean to you, the network engineer? The executive suite probably doesn’t know what their AI idea might mean for infrastructure. They might only have a vague idea of what they’re even trying to accomplish with an AI initiative. Regardless, that initiative puts... Read more »
Sep 12, 2025 • 54min
HN796: The Why and How of Making Your Infrastructure Quantum-Safe (Sponsored)
Your production IT operations are almost certainly using cryptography libraries that are not quantum-safe, and the time to begin planning a cryptography overhaul is now. But this is likely to be a daunting project because it touches everything: clients, servers, apps, network devices, middleboxes, and so on. Daunting, but doable. We talk with Richu Channakeshava, Principal... Read more »
Sep 5, 2025 • 58min
HN795: Adventures In Latency
Monitoring and troubleshooting latency can be tricky. If it’s in the network, was it the IP stack? A NIC? A switch buffer? A middlebox somewhere on the WAN? If it’s the application, can you, the network engineer, bring receipts to the app team? And what if you need to build and operate a network that’s... Read more »
Aug 29, 2025 • 1h 4min
HN794: How the Bundle Protocol Enables Interplanetary Networking
How might we get network traffic from Earth to a lunar base? Or Mars? Or to spaceships carrying astronauts or probes exploring space? And how do we get it back? The problem, among other things, is latency. The answer isn’t TCP/IP. The answer is…complicated. On today’s Heavy Networking we explore the challenges of getting packets... Read more »
7 snips
Aug 22, 2025 • 1h 35min
HN793: A Deep Dive Into High-Performance Switch Memory
LJ Wobker, a Principal Engineer at Cisco with expertise in high-performance memory, shares insights on the intricacies of switch memory. He discusses the differences between TCAM, SRAM, DRAM, and HBM, and the trade-offs in managing these resources for networking. The conversation covers how Ethernet frames are processed, the challenges of implementing TCAM technology, and the evolution of routing practices. Wobker emphasizes the need for strategic memory management to optimize network performance and the value of community engagement in navigating these complexities.
Aug 15, 2025 • 46min
HN792: Understanding Agentic AI for Network Operations (Sponsored)
LLMs and AI-powered chatbots are becoming a regular feature of network operations tools and vendor product portfolios. Now the next iteration of AI in network ops and automation is likely to be agentic. On today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by HPE Juniper Networking, we talk about what agentic AI actually means, how AI agents will accomplish... Read more »
Aug 8, 2025 • 56min
HN791: Should You Build or Buy Your Automation Platform?
Perhaps the biggest question around adopting network automation is whether you should build a solution using open source tools and a lot of coding glue, or buy a network automation platform from a vendor and construct your automation solution on top of that. Either way has tradeoffs. Network engineer Lee Harper joins Heavy Networking to... Read more »
